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evening such as this. Tonight I will be engulfed.
INFLATO:
Oh, my.
MO:
So, wine then.
BARTHES:
To start from a dream: If I slip, fall, and hurt myself in a dream, where is the cause of my fall? If it is a banana peel on which I slip, then is it in my dream or is it in the real world, where there are banana peels, where I learned about banana peels? (Nietzsche) And why a banana, of all fruits? What is it that excites our cause-creating drive? A kind of nervus sympathicus? But that banana, the shape of it, the obviousness of it. (Freud) But, of course, some are more banana than are others, a sort of general formula for embarrassment. Wouldn’t you say, Townsend?
INFLATO:
Douglas, please.
MO:
Here’s your wine, Professor Barthes.
INFLATO:
I’ve been trying to perform semiological analysis on the film Lawrence of Arabia and it hasn’t been going well.
BARTHES:
You must first accept the structural pitfalls of gestural language and realize how, shall we say, impotent the hand of the director, not only is, but must be. This in order to allow the film the room it needs for the kind of attention I need to give it. (Twain) And the particular movie you mention, why it has no clutter of cultural signs, despite its pretense. The function of the signs is in tacit conspiracy with the subverted language in all games of discourse and that is, of course, the final blow to the director.
Don’t you agree?
INFLATO:
Yes.
MO:
Why don’t we move into the other room for dinner?
    Mo lifted me from my playpen and carried me to the table. As she strapped me into my high chair, she whispered, “I hope you’re not as bored as I am.” I nodded, but she didn’t see it. I looked at the cigarette dangling from Barthes’ fingers. He did not notice my staring. I don’t think he was aware of my presence.
MO:
We’re having pork butt. I hope you eat meat.
INFLATO:
Some months ago I sent you an off-print of my paper on alterity. It was in Critical Inquiry.
BARTHES:
Christian eschatology appears in two forms, one personal, the other cosmic. When a person dies, it’s like a world ending. 16 (Aquinas) But what is an ending, except for a narrative device, a trick of language that would have one accept the distances between sounds and the signs representing them, between denotation and connotation. (Searle) A spectrum exists with me at one end and unformed matter at the other and in between, just as before, is all sense and nonsense. Everything and nothing are ontological. The closer to me an idea gets, the less sense it makes because of its distance from its refractory origin. I call the distance infinite privation.
INFLATO:
The article was in a green envelope.
BARTHES:
Evil is a privation of sorts, a lack of goodness, just as emptiness is a lack of that which would make a void full or complete. (Miller) But when a man and a woman decide that language is simply skin and they rub it against one another, then the privation becomes something else again. Imagine that words had fingers and we talked and achieved a kind of double contact. (Plato) Wouldn’t that negate privation? Wouldn’t it have to? Unless, of course, one believes in evil love.
    I looked up because of what I had heard, but my parents were so perplexed as to be dumbfounded. They stared at their plates and pushed pork butt and string beans around. But Barthes was looking at my mother with his French accent.
BARTHES:
Townsend, about your article.
INFLATO:
Yes?
BARTHES:
I haven’t read it.
vita nova
    The Sternum
    Level,
    centerpiece of the table
    of my chest,
    find the median line,
    locate my heart.
    Oblique in inclination
    from above and downward,
    forward,
    it is my shield.
    Convex on anterior
    surface from side
    to side, concave
    from above
    and downward.
    Manubrium,
    gladiolus,
    ensiform,
    come together,
    absorb the world
    through compact tissue.
degrees
    I have endeavored, rather rudely perhaps, to trace the genealogy of the sickness that infected my father, and so my parents, and so my